Reviews

Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, xx + 401 pp., £40.00.

Hugh Macdonald, The Soviet Challenge and the Structure of European Security. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990, ix + 318 pp., £38.50.

Jonathan Eyal, ed. The Warsaw Pact and the Balkans: Moscow's Southern Flank. London: Macmillan Press, 1989, xvi + 246 pp., £35.00.

Kurt M. Campbell & S. Neil MacFarlane, eds., Gorbachev's Third World Dilemmas. London & New York: Routledge, 1989, xvi + 270 pp., £35.00.

Terry L. Thompson, Ideology and Policy: The Political Uses of Doctrine in the Soviet Union. London: Westview Press, Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989, viii + 220 pp., $28.95 p/b.

Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 266 pp., £9.95 p/b.

Maria Lo?, ed., The Second Economy in Marxist States. London: Macmillan, 1990, xiv + 240 pp., £37.50.

Harley D. Balzer, Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989, xxi + 290 pp., $32.50.

Michael Ryan, Doctors and the State in the Soviet Union. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989, ix + 205 pp., £37.50.

Jerzy Tomaszewski, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe: Their Establishment and Consolidation 1944–67, Trans. Jolanta Krauze. London: Routledge, 1989, 305 pp., £40.00.

Paul G. Lewis, Political Authority and Party Secretaries in Poland 1975–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, xix + 340 pp., £35.00.

Leonard J. Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power in Yugoslavia. Oakville, TX: Mosaic Press, 1989, 499 pp., $29.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.

Diane P. Koenker & William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, xix + 393 pp., $39.50.     

Food safety regulation: is the Delaney clause the problem or symptom?

The Delaney anticancer amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 is a prominent example of zero risk legislation. The relevant clauses prohibit a finding of safety for any relevant substance found to induce cancer in humans or animals. It is argued that the Delaney approach to safety regulation is not only misguided, but that relaxation of the law - for example, to permit substances that pose insignificant cancer risks - would produce only marginal improvement in regulation. A major shift in regulation that permits some form of cost-benefit analysis is the only way to move toward rational policy choices.Professor of Economics, Rutgers University. I am grateful to William Ascher, Richard A. Merrill, and two referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Geschworenengerichtsbarkeit und faires Verfahren

In den letzten Jahren ist es zu einer Diskussion darüber gekommen, ob die Begründung des geschworenengerichtlichen Wahrspruchs den Anforderungen des Art 6 MRK entspricht. Der EGMR hat in der Rechtssache Taxquet in einem das belgische Geschworenenverfahren betreffenden Fall unter Berufung auf die Begründungslosigkeit des Wahrspruchs eine Verletzung des Art 6 MRK bejaht, dann - in einer Entscheidung der Gro?en Kammer - verneint. Der OGH hat in einer Reihe von Entscheidungen keinen Anlass gesehen, die Konventionskonformit?t des ?sterr geschworenengerichtlichen Verfahrens in Zweifel zu ziehen. Zuletzt ist die Diskussion wieder aufgeflammt. Wie steht es nun um das Spannungsverh?ltnis von begründungslosem Wahrspruch und Verfahrensfairness?     

Coalition formation on major policy dimensions: The Council of the European Union 1998 to 2004

Using data of contested decisions in the Council of the European Union, combined with data on the position of member states on the left-right and support for European integration dimensions, this paper provides an overview of winning coalitions formed in the council in the 1998 to 2004 time span. It shows distance between the combined policy positions of winning coalitions to individual EU states within these coalitions and demonstrates that most winning coalitions in the Council have a large combined voting weight, minimal winning coalitions are rare, and ideological connectedness plays a much smaller role than expected.     

Revising the Democratic Revolution--into the Americas

This article examines the claims of the democratic peace thesis by tracing the embedding of democracy in three countries: Nicaragua, Brazil and Colombia. In so doing it highlights the way in which the democratic peace that has spread in the post-cold war period has to be understood as part of a continued imperialist strategy by the core capitalist states and their dominant social forces in the modern world system. The meaning of democracy in this revolution is to promote and instill a form of corporate government that reinforces private power against human needs and rights. Nonetheless, this is an unstable strategy and the three examples considered here illustrate that this creates space for anti-capitalist opposition to organise and challenge this restricted conception of democracy.     

Foreign Influences and Shifting Horizons: The Ongoing Evolution of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

This article details how prior to the establishment of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AGIM), Meghrebis—that is, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and others--made up a significant percentage of the foreign fighters in the al Qaeda-led insurgency in Iraq, thus helping to build the trust networks between al Qaeda central and the Maghreb-based groups, culminating in the the 2007 formal affiliation of the Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat (GSPC) with al Qaeda. Since then, an emboldened AQIM has evolved significantly, both strategically and operationally.